A collection of our favorite strategies for learning as an individual.
Roughly organized in order of preference: proven, high-leverage strategies are listed before less-important ones.
If you have a strategy you'd like to add or edit, please consider contributing.
School taught us to obey. Unschool yourself. The locus of authority should be within you. Don't give away your power.
Stay afraid, but do it anyway. What’s important is the action. You don’t have to wait to be confident. Just do it and eventually the confidence will follow.
Carrie Fisher
Learning is work. "Natural" talent is mostly baloney; don't use it as an excuse or a crutch. With the right effort and environment, everyone learns.
Mindset change is not about picking up a few pointers here and there. It’s about seeing things in a new way. When people—couples, coaches and athletes, managers and workers, parents and children, teachers and students—change to a growth mindset, they change from a judge-and-be-judged framework to a learn-and-help-learn framework. Their commitment is to growth, and growth takes plenty of time, effort, and mutual support.
Carol S. Dweck, "Mindset: The New Psychology of Success"
Find your zone of proximal development (ZPD). Set goals that scare you and commit to them. Figure out what you need to improve on and focus your energy there. Embrace your shortcomings, and then address them. Always move outside your comfort zone.
Some signs that you may not be in your ZPD:
- You’re retreating or disengaging
- You can’t drive the project, you’re waiting for instructions
- You’re watching, "sous chef", instead of leading & getting assistance
- Your XP is consistently low
- Your challenge score is below 6 or above 8
- There's no part of the project that you can tackle independently
- You don't know what kinds of questions to ask when doing a cognitive apprenticeship with someone or pairing with them (i.e. you don't know enough to identify what you're having trouble with or ask questions about)
Another component of deliberate practice is self-assessment. It is important to know if your actual abilities match you perceived abilities.
One way to do self-assessment is to pick a challenge or problem that you feel like you should be able to accomplish given your current experience and skill. Set up clear objectives and success criteria for the challenge, give yourself a reasonable time frame, and then try to accomplish it without additional support.
It may be difficult. You will probably be surprised in many ways: by things that you were able to do that you didn't think you were capable of, and by things that you struggled with that you thought you were fluent in.
After you finish the challenge, ask yourself questions like:
- What was most challenging? Where did I make the most mistakes?
- What were concepts/words/aspects of the challenge that I didn't know? Where are the gaps in my knowledge and experience?
- What was I able to achieve? How far can my current skills take me, and how is that different from my past self-assessment?
If you self-assess on a regular basis, you will be able to reference past self assessments and gauge your own progress. This is a crucial component to being a lifelong learner: being able to recognize growth in yourself.
In contrast to play, deliberate practice is a highly structured activity, the explicit goal of which is to improve performance. Specific tasks are invented to overcome weaknesses, and performance is carefully monitored to provide cues for ways to improve it further. We claim that deliberate practice requires effort and is not inherently enjoyable. Individuals are motivated to practice because practice improves performance.
K. Anders Ericsson, Ralf Th. Krampe, and Clemens Tesch-Romer: "The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance"
Don't just guess and check. Develop mental models, and then rigorously try to disprove them. When you are wrong, figure out where, how, and why. Then improve your mental model.
Right after you learn something new, force yourself to recall it and then check your recall against the facts.
A more robust form of forced recall is the Feynman Technique:
- Pick a concept you are learning.
- Describe it as if you were speaking to a 5 year old. Don't try to make it perfect or complete.
- Find the gaps in your understanding. Compare your description to the source, and see what you got wrong.
- Simplify the concept and build an analogy. Link the new concept to something you already know.
Amateurs collect knowledge. Pros develop skills.
Programming is not about what you know it's about what you can figure out.
Ancient Proverb
We all have biases. There are a whole lot of them. If you don't think you are biased, there's a bias for that 😉.
The good news is that as you develop awareness of them, you can become less susceptible to them.
The illusion that we understand the past fosters overconfidence in our ability to predict the future.
Daniel Kahneman, "Thinking, Fast and Slow"
Get comfortable with doubt and uncertainty. You cannot know all the things. But that doesn't mean you can't have fun.
We absolutely must leave room for doubt or there is no progress and no learning. There is no learning without having to pose a question. And a question requires doubt. People search for certainty. But there is no certainty. People are terrified — how can you live and not know? It is not odd at all. You only think you know, as a matter of fact. And most of your actions are based on incomplete knowledge and you really don't know what it is all about, or what the purpose of the world is, or know a great deal of other things. It is possible to live and not know.
Richard Feynman